Category Archives: Truth

Those who know me know that I like meat. I’m an unrepentant carnivore.

So, naturally, I have spent much of the scant recreational time I have during the Olympic Games in search of the best Korean barbeque available in the PyeongChang area.

Living in Los Angeles, I’m acquainted with the tradition of Korean barbeque – but I figured that, being in the motherland, I could treat myself to the very best. My first two attempts at local Korean BBQ dining were good – but neither was a meat-eater’s home run.

And then, last night, I found — and enjoyed — Korean BBQ heaven.

Our cameraman Corey found the place. It was a 20-minute cab ride from our Phoenix Park hotel – but we were hungry for adventure (and barbequed beef) so we were down for the excursion.

What follows is a pictorial progression through a beef lover’s Korean BBQ pilgrimage. Vegan’s need not apply…

This is the downstairs dining area. You’ll note that there are only Koreans here at this point in the evening. That is absolutely a good sign. We’ve come to the right place.

This night was Korean Lunar New Year. And the South Koreans were enjoying one of their biggest annual holidays. (See Vietnam’s Tet.) Does the Tet Offensive ring a bell?

We didn’t realize it when we set out, but the restaurant would get very, very busy — and we would have to wait a while to be seated, unlike these folks who shared a special Asian room, with no chairs.

(No shoes, please.)

After dinner, we’d be unable to get a cab ride home because of the busy holiday, but that’s another matter.

The whole evening took 5 hours. But, all in all, it was well worth it!

The first step in traditional Korean Barbecue is to visit the butcher and buy your cuts of meat.

This woman knows her meat. She explained that the steer we’d be eating was raised organically, with no hormones, grass fed — and A #1. She was not bullshitting.

We bought our beef BEFORE we cooked it. That’s the way it goes. You buy your meat first, then you get seated — and your drinks and everything else are billed later. Meat is Job #1.

With cameraman Corey in the lead, we hauled out cuts of beef to the upstairs dining room after a 20-minute wait. We were famished — but we anticipated beefy, tasty, spicy joy in our near future.

The upstairs dining room. It’s getting busy. The meat is about to get cooking…

Unlike our cold, steel and glass hotel in Phoenix Park, this Korean BBQ place features warm wood and delightful crystal chandeliers — which we would later learn are from the United States!

Seated across the table from me are my AP, Agatha, and my EP, David. We’re all hungry.

Next, they fire up the tabletop grill. The main meat-lovers event is about to go down…

As the meat grills, you combine ingredients into your bowl — in my case, chili paste, peppers, onions and garlic — so you can plunge your beef bits deep into this spicy heaven.

Next, Corey pulls down the exhaust fan. Otherwise, we’ll all be asphyxiated….

Our waiter provides some assistance. Everyone is helpful. They all want us to have a great time.

As our first beef course sears on the grill, our crew poses for a pre-meal photo. We’ve all been working hard — and we’re eager for a great meal. Luckily, David & Corey are Korean BBQ experts.

Corey took over as grillmaster. For those of you who know me from Greek Easter — you can appreciate how much I respect Corey’s Korean BBQ chops!

Each cut of beef was better than the next — and the last course was the best of all…

Corey was far too modest. His grilling of that last fabulous cut of beef was superb. But our meal was not yet complete. Corey had another great idea…

At Corey’s suggestion we ordered this. Somehow, all of this tasty goodness boiled down into an incredible, sweet beef and veggie soup.

And finally, here’s our host. Jean went to college and spent a lot of time in Los Angeles (as have a lot of educated South Koreans we’re met). She returned to South Korea a year ago and started running this restaurant — recognized on Trip Advisor as the best in PyeongChang.

I’m awarding her an Winter Olympic Gold Medal for the Best Korean BBQ.

If you’re a Bernie Sanders fan (as I was), reject Susan Sarandon’s third-party nihilism and vote for the only woman who can defeat the abomination that is Donald J. Trump.

If you’re a woman, please — have you been listening to Trump? Vote for Hillary.

If you’re married to a woman, or just in love with a woman, or you simply like women – vote for Hillary out of respect for the women you appreciate and respect.

If you’re Latino, vote for Hillary in droves. He has made you and your parents his scapegoat.

If you’re African-American, vote for Hillary. After all, says Trump, what do you have to lose?

If you’re Muslim, or any religious minority with a history of persecution in this country, vote for Hillary. (This, unfortunately, includes all of us blue collar Irish and Italian Catholics.)

If you believe in science and the salvation of our planet, vote for Hillary. Trump says climate change is a hoax perpetrated by China. (I don’t know that he actually believes this – but that’s what he says to get the votes of West Virginia coal miners and Oklahoma oil workers.)

If you call yourself a Christian, vote for Hillary. How many of The Beatitudes would Donald Trump agree with? Can you image Trump saying, “Blessed are the meek, for they will inherit the earth?”

If you’re a parent, vote for Hillary. Do you want your children to grow up in a pro-bully culture?

But now that Donald Trump sees the writing on the wall (and the polls), his destructive attack on the integrity of the American election process itself leaves his Veep pick with no other way to save his dignity, credibility and reputation than to jettison the flame-throwing narcissistic demagogue at the top of the ticket.

For the good of our democracy, Pence must dump Trump.

Now.

Mike Pence says he’s a follower of Jesus Christ. What is there in the four Gospels that give any indication that the Prince of Peace would approve of Donald J. Trump? Not a thing. Re-read the Sermon on the Mount – especially the Beatitudes. Nowhere does Jesus say, “Blessed are the whining sore losers, for theirs is the right to torch the landscape in their wake.”

In 1960, when Richard Nixon lost by the thinnest of whiskers to John F. Kennedy, even the man who would become infamous for campaign “dirty tricks” and Watergate respected the vote of the American people, despite unproven claims of election fraud in Illinois and West Virginia.

In 2000, when Al Gore lost by a few hanging Florida chads (and one dubious Supreme Court decision) to George W. Bush, Gore went before the cameras after the Florida recount was halted to put the nation first and acknowledge the legitimacy of his defeat.

And now comes Donald Trump. He’s not even waiting for his eventual (and much deserved) defeat to cast doubt on the fairness of our American democracy.

Trump incites his angry followers to show up at the polls to watch out for the mass voter fraud he assures them will take place. Especially in those “inner cities” filled with, well, you know, those people…

And then there’s all those illegal immigrants Trump claims are pouring across our border to vote for Hillary. Because, of course, tens of thousands of desperate Central Americans are surely lining up to risk their lives and fortunes on a dangerous and expensive U.S. border crossing so they can put Hillary in the White House. (If you believe that, I have a bankrupt casino I’d like to sell you.)

Trump indicts the dishonest media for its part in rigging the election against him. Really? Is that what FOX, CNN and MSNBC were doing for a solid year when they covered just about every one of his rallies from start to finish? When they would put Hillary or Bernie Sanders in a little box in the corner of the frame while The Donald held court full screen? The truth is that the cable news networks were major enablers of Trump’s candidacy.

Yet even though all of Trump’s talk of a rigged election is absolute crap – millions of his followers believe him.

And that’s why Mike Pence – who surely knows better – must take a stand by standing down.

If Mike Pence doesn’t repudiate Trump’s claims of a rigged election in the strongest terms — and quit the Trump ticket now — he will have forfeited his credibility as a future candidate in our American democracy.

The mainstream media is starting to point out something about Donald Trump that’s been clear from the moment he formally announced his campaign for the Presidency on June 16, 2015: the man is a serial liar.

Those of us who have spent too much of the past year screaming at our television as a prostrate press allowed The Donald to spew lies, damned lies and bogus statistics are heartened to see that fact-checking Trump has recently become the latest journalistic fad.

Hopefully, this fact-checking fad will catch on like Pokémon Go.

And what was the final straw that aroused the media to finally challenge Trump’s truthiness?

Was it when the nation’s print journalists, television anchors, reporters and pundits realized there was actually a chance that an unqualified, incurious, racist, thin-skinned demagogue could wind up with access to the nuclear launch codes?

Hardly.

It was when Trump embarrassed the media by suckering them into flocking to his newest hotel on September 16. The Trump campaign promised a press conference to clear the air after The Donald’s disastrous refusal to acknowledge Obama’s citizenship in an interview with The Washington Post.

But the press did not get their promised press conference.

Instead, they all devoted precious airtime to what turned out to be an extended promotional event for Trump’s newly opened luxury hotel in Washington, plus a string of testimonials from a collection of retired military figures –followed by a few words from Trump on the birther issue.

“Hillary Clinton and her campaign of 2008 started the birther controversy. I finished it. I finished it, you know what I mean. President Barack Obama was born in the United States. Period.”

Burned by the great orange con man into investing network and newspaper resources on Trump’s shameless promotional bait & switch, the media did something they’d rarely done before: they all pointed out that most of what Trump has just said was a lie.

And then they actually started using the word “lie”.

They noted that the Clinton campaign did not start the birther thing.

They made it clear that Trump did not “finish it”. In fact, he’d fanned it. Right up until that Washington Post interview.

Headlines announced that Trump had traded one grudging truth for two falsehoods. The New York Times began calling it “the birther lie” – and said things like this:

So, as we await the first Presidential Debate between Trump and Hillary Clinton, everyone in the media is now talking about fact-checking – and, surprise, Trump and his surrogates are howling like stuck pigs.

So now, just hours after Donald Trump couldn’t bring himself to admit to The Washington Post that President Barack Obama was born in the U.S.A. — some campaign flunky puts out a statement saying that Herr Trump actually believes that Obama is, in fact, born in America.

Well, let’s hear that from Donald J. Trump himself.

And then let’s hear him tell us what the hell this nonsense (or pack of shameless lies) was all about 5 years ago:

(CNN) Possibly-serious Republican presidential candidate Donald Trump is giving few details about the investigation he claims to have launched in Hawaii to get to the bottom of where President Obama was born, but the business mogul told CNN Thursday Americans will be “very surprised” by what he has found.

“We’re looking into it very, very strongly. At a certain point in time I’ll be revealing some interesting things,” Trump said on CNN’s American Morning.Trump first claimed earlier this month he had sent investigators to Obama’s home state in an effort to find out if the president was indeed born there, as he says he was and several media organization’s independent investigations have confirmed.

“I have people that have been studying it and they cannot believe what they’re finding,” Trump told NBC then.

******

C’mon mass media! Don’t let Trump skate on this one. What specific “interesting things” did he find out about Obama’s citizenship five years ago?

What did his “people that have been studying it” really find? And why could they not “believe what they’re finding.”

Trump said all this crap.

The media must get Trump to say that Obama is a citizen with his own lips – and then ask the follow-up questions.

For those with limited time to read — here’s a key segment of the opener:

The Trump Organization is not like the Bill, Hillary & Chelsea Clinton Foundation, the charitable enterprise that has been the subject of intense scrutiny about possible conflicts for the Democratic presidential nominee. There are allegations that Hillary Clinton bestowed benefits on contributors to the foundation in some sort of “pay to play” scandal when she was secretary of state, but that makes no sense because there was no “pay.” Money contributed to the foundation was publicly disclosed and went to charitable efforts, such as fighting neglected tropical diseases that infect as many as a billion people. The financials audited by PricewaterhouseCoopers, the global independent accounting company, and the foundation’s tax filings show that about 90 percent of the money it raised went to its charitable programs. (Trump surrogates have falsely claimed that it was only 10 percent and that the rest was used as a Clinton “slush fund.”) No member of the Clinton family received any cash from the foundation, nor did it finance any political campaigns. In fact, like the Clintons, almost the entire board of directors works for free.

On the other hand, the Trump family rakes in untold millions of dollars from the Trump Organization every year. Much of that comes from deals with international financiers and developers, many of whom have been tied to controversial and even illegal activities. None of Trump’s overseas contractual business relationships examined by Newsweek were revealed in his campaign’s financial filings with the Federal Election Commission, nor was the amount paid to him by his foreign partners.

Bold emphasis mine.

Are you listening, corporate news media? Are you ready now to make Trump and his surrogates answer the tough questions? Not about his silly circus sideshow with Dr. Oz – but the far more important questions raised by Newsweek.

And, if you need any more questions, Keith Olbermann has 176 reasons to grill Trump right here: